The Only Thing Faster Than a Paper Leak Is the Government’s Ability to Blame the Victims

Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. Under Narendra Modi’s BJP the Indian competitive exam system has become a national joke with a body count measured in ruined years and emptied bank accounts. Papers leak like a sieve. Students who treated the process like a religion get told to start over. Families sink money they don’t have into coaching, travel and retests. And the party that never shuts up about merit, discipline and national strength responds with the political equivalent of a shrug and a police lathi.

The pattern is so consistent it feels deliberate. Leak. Outrage. Retest. Committee. “We are taking this very seriously.” Fast-track courts that somehow never arrive on time. Then the real work begins: making the students the villains. When Gen Z shows up at Jantar Mantar under the Cockroach Janta Party name, the government does not treat it like a catastrophic failure of the system it controls. It treats it like an image problem that needs to be crushed. Talks are offered only on the government’s terms, in the government’s rooms, under the government’s conditions. Refuse the setup and you are instantly a “disruptive element.” Police arrive with batons and tear gas. Universities send legal threats. Local officials schedule mosquito spraying and volunteer events on the exact protest spots. Organizers’ social media accounts go dark. The ruling party’s message is crystal clear: you may be angry, but you will not be allowed to look angry in a way that damages the brand.

This is the same political machine that spent a decade selling itself as the only honest, efficient, nationalist force in the country. Yet under its watch the entrance exam system has turned into a seasonal scam. Papers appear on Telegram before students even reach the centers. The same people who lecture the nation about hard work and purity of effort cannot keep a question paper from being sold like cheap street food. The Education Minister becomes the temporary sacrifice. Calls for resignation rise. The party closes ranks. The Prime Minister appears just long enough to promise another “foolproof” system, as if the previous foolproof systems were never promised. Then the cycle resets and the next batch of students gets to discover that their future was already compromised before they walked into the hall.

What makes the whole thing especially grotesque is the moral theater. The BJP will brand almost any critic an anti-national, a foreign agent, or a threat to the country’s pride. But when the people being failed are its own students, the language suddenly softens into process, dialogue, and “lessons learned.” The same government that loves photo-ops with toppers and success stories goes quiet when the system it runs keeps producing scandals. Accountability is for other people. Ownership is for other governments. Under this one, the exam papers leak, the students pay, and the political machinery keeps spinning the same exhausted script.

The kids at Jantar Mantar and across the country are not the problem. They are the only part of this story that still has a spine. The problem is a ruling party that has turned institutional failure into routine, then acts shocked when the people most affected refuse to clap for the performance. Paper leaks are no longer accidents. They are the predictable output of a system that prioritizes control and image over competence. And every time the government answers student rage with tear gas and conditional “dialogue,” it confirms exactly what the protesters already know: the people in charge are far more interested in protecting themselves than in protecting the exams that decide millions of lives.

Keep marching. The alternative is accepting that this is just how things work now under the party that promised something better.